Chapter 34 Hardest Lesson I Ever Had to Learn
Hardest Lesson I Ever Had to Learn
Aria
The air is ice-cold. My arms are wrapped around my upper body, and I’m shifting my weight from one foot to the other.
A bluethroat shoots out of the fir tree next to me, stretches its delicate wings, and flies across Silver Lake.
Snow trickles down and lands gently on my shoulder before I hear footsteps behind me.
They fade as the person next to me stops.
The aura is so familiar to me, the smell—I don’t even have to look.
“What do you want, Wyatt?”
“I saw the video.”
I vacantly contemplate the frozen lake, whose surface is reflecting the stars. “That’s no longer important.”
“It will always be important, Aria.”
To keep perspective, I’m concentrating on the cutting feeling of the cold on my skin. We’re standing next to each other but staring straight ahead. From the corner of my eye, I can see that he’s buried his hands in his jacket, and every time he exhales, I see his breath.
“I’m meeting someone. You might want to get going.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He takes a deep breath and turns to me. An owl hoots in the distance. “Have I ever stood you up?”
“We don’t have a date.”
“We do.”
A few feet to my right, the starlight illuminates the head of a baby elk peeking out from between two firs.
It ventures forward cautiously, but when it stretches out its still fragile little leg and touches the ice with one hoof, it quickly pulls back again and disappears into the shelter of the trees.
I turn away. “I’m meeting Paxton, Wyatt.”
“I am Paxton.”
Now I turn to face him. And it hurts. Seeing his face, so striking and beautiful, so loved, and just so Wyatt, breaks my heart.
“What?”
He briefly looks out onto the lake, to the mountains in the distance, before turning back to look at me. “You never texted with Paxton, Aria. It was me. The whole time.”
For a while, all I can do is hold his stare as I try to understand what he’s just said. His words only filter through to me in bits and pieces, and when I finally realize it, I can only shake my head.
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit.” Wyatt pulls his hand out of his pocket and with it his phone. He unlocks it, and the display lights up. With trembling fingers, he holds it out to me. I focus on the image until I realize that it’s a chat. Ours.
As if in a trance, I reach out my finger, touch the display, and scroll.
There they are. All of our texts. Beginning with the one I wrote telling him I’d like to get to know him.
“Impossible. That’s… You stole his phone.”
Wyatt laughs drily as he puts it back in his pocket. “You really believe that, Aria?”
“We talked on the phone. And I know his voice.”
“That wasn’t my voice or Paxton’s. Camila downloaded an app that made me sound like Justin Bieber. Ask her if you don’t believe me.”
I blink. Quickly. This can’t be. He’s full of crap. “You’re telling me that it was you in that lobster outfit?”
He nods.
“And that you texted with me all that time I was trashing you?”
He nods again. And suddenly it dawns on me.
The strange attraction between us as we sat in the dark at the party.
The tingling in my stomach the whole time we were texting, talking on the phone, whenever I was thinking about him.
His strange behavior at his party. The sudden silence when I’d had enough of him after the thing with the woman in the pool…
When I stopped messaging him after we got closer again…
My throat constricts, squeezes the air out of me, and at the same time forms a lump that is far too big for me to bear.
The time with him was my only hope, my only proof that I could leave Wyatt behind.
That my heart was capable of beating for someone else.
But it was never anyone else. It was Wyatt the whole time.
Everything collapses. The full extent of what the wreckage of our past is doing to me. I gasp. I can’t stop the lump inside me from bursting. I can’t stop the hopelessness from turning into tears.
“You destroyed me, Wyatt. You destroyed me and won’t stop.”
“Aria, I never wanted…”
“Why don’t you just stop?” I yell. “You won, Wyatt, okay? You won. You’re the only one for me, and I’ll probably never manage to get away from you.
I’ll probably always have to think about how I thought liking someone else was possible, but it was you.
YOU. WON. Okay?” With every word I hit him in the chest, and there are tears dripping off my upper lip, salt on the tip of my tongue, and somewhere inside me there’s a butterfly that’s forgotten how to laugh, that’s forgotten how this whole flying thing works.
That’s forgotten what sunshine tastes like.
“Ari.” Wyatt takes hold of my fists. His touch causes a burning sensation on my skin, right where his fingers close around my wrists.
“There wasn’t anything going on between Gwen and me.
She’s a friend and invited me to the diner for my birthday.
We ran into each other at Silver Lake by accident.
The picture, that was… I took that for her because she’d stopped believing in herself.
I even told her about us, and she was happy. Believe me.”
My breath is heavy. I can feel my chin trembling as I swallow again and again to hold back the tears. Unsuccessfully. All it takes is the smallest movement from my end, and he lets go of my hands immediately.
“Whether I believe you or not doesn’t play any role.
” I slowly step back and wipe my arm across my face.
“It doesn’t play any role because I don’t trust you anymore, and that’s why all this here hurts so goddamn bad.
For the first time, I’m realizing that it’s really over, that the last bit of hope has died. ”
His face goes completely white. He looks like a ghost. “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”
I ball my hands back into fists, but instead of punching them into his chest again, I press them against my thighs. “What’s a relationship without trust, Wyatt?”
He doesn’t respond. He’s frozen, panic etched into his features, his eyes, everywhere, because now he sees it, too, and he’s feeling the pain, more than just pain, because we loved that hope so much.
“Exactly. Nothing.”
The butterfly inside me sinks to the ground. Its wings tremble a few more times—those wings it would so much like to use to fly, to taste the clouds, the sky, life, love.
I turn around and go. This time Wyatt doesn’t call after me. This time he doesn’t try to stop me.
The butterfly no longer moves.